A blog about our life on the family farm. Lots of animals, chickens, hair sheep, dexter cows, horses, border collies, alpaca. Read about how the farm life is tackled by a full time working couple.

Monday, July 18, 2011

House is clean back outside

I spent the day playing catch up today. I have had to deal with the creeping thyme starts we have been growing from seed. We started almost 1000 plugs with seeds. They have been dying in droves lately. Annmarie thinks they need more soil. I think they are getting too wet. So Sarah and I are replanting them so they have more soil. Unfortunately, even with lots of them dying that leaves about 600 plugs to plant. That is a whole lot of plants to transplant. Luckily, we have been saving yogurt containers for just this reason and my father had an entire trash bag full of small plastic containers also. The next problem is how do you put drain holes in 600 plastic containers? During this Winter I used my drill to put holes in the bottom of the containers, but this was going to take me a single day just to drill holes. Unfortunately, I don't get to take credit for this brainstorm of an idea. The credit lies solely with Paul a friend at work. He told me to shoot a hole through the containers with my 22 pistol!! I should have thought of it myself. I trimmed one of the branches out of the large tree out front that way.

So for all those inquiring minds, Dannon yogurt containers work the best. They are very flexible and this allows the bullet to go through without cracking the plastic, just leaves a nice round hole. You can only shoot through about 10 containers at once as they don't stack well and if you don't stack nice and straight or shoot straight the bullet ends up coming out the side of the distant containers instead of continuing down through the bottom. The hard plastic yogurt containers are nice containers but they break from the bullet impact. They still work but the entire bottom of the container has cracks all the way to the edges. Yoplait containers are a no go, they are shaped incorrectly so I won't use them. The container has to go wide to shallow or how else are you going to get the dirt out in one piece? I sat on the edge of the porch and shot up a few hundred containers. One more word of wisdom, muzzle blast. Keep the pistol muzzle back away from the containers or the muzzle blast will break or move the containers.

Sarah and I have 6.5 flats of starts to re-pot. We did four tonight. It is a fairly laborious process. Near dark we went out to see if the old wheat truck would start. I wanted it to be as cool as possible as last year the yellow jackets were living in the truck and under the hood. I was hoping they would be dormant. I brought the jumper cables to give the truck a little extra juice. Of course, I had to knock down two different yellow jacket nests and dodge them for five minutes. Sarah and I had a discussion on how to use jumper cables. She knew the colors and what terminal to hook them up at (thanks to phinnius and pherb cartoon, for which I was informed she should be allowed to watch more educational TV). I told her how to do it, what to look for and as I attempted to hook the positive terminal up sparks flew everywhere. Then I had to tell her that that was what happened when you attempted to hook the positive terminal to the ground and don't do it, it is dangerous. After correcting the polarity, I hooked the jumper cables up correctly and attempted to get into the truck. I had to scrape out one more yellow jacket nest and then wait a couple of minutes. Amazingly, the truck started with some gently persuasion. I could not believe it. I had not started it for almost one year.

Tomorrow I will get a 10 day trip permit at the DMV and pick up some scrap 2x6 boards and a dog kennel. Got them from a friend for the price of removal from the scrap pile outside his shop. While I was talking to him we got on the topic of my greenhouse. I said I was looking for free windows and he was removing 10 from a house he is working on. So I scored some more windows. I want to put some in the barn also to increase the light inside the building. Once I have gotten the scrap home and unloaded it I will go into the hardware store and get everything for the bridge. I still have to have a load of gravel delivered, but I will call for that tomorrow. Everything will be in place except for some help. Still working on that.